Jimi Hendrix and I Wait Together

I won’t use any of the clichés to describe his hands, his fingers—
such as sculpted or tapered or birdlike—but I will say that
they looked capable of tearing hard fruit in half,
of splitting bread for a crowd,
I will say that his fingers were defined as if manufactured and certain,
the nails short and clean,
muscles appeared on the left hand where I assumed no muscles could form,
I can say that the color on his hands was uniform and calming as if it, too,
the color of creamy Creole coffee,
was pertinent to his playing.

You can find pictures and pictures of his smile flashing his teeth and see them,
bold and square and shining back at the camera.
You can close your eyes and hear his goofy laugh.
I don’t have to describe his smile.

“It worked itself out in my head when I was on the toilet.”
The rhythm of this sentence started slow and sped up.
Everything about him, musical, musical, musical.
Who meets at bus stops in Wisconsin?
He said, “I dig The Beatles, too. People don’t know what me and Paul have.”
Who meets in bus stops in Wisconsin?
We do. That is how we met.

DeMisty D. Bellinger teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. She has an MFA in creative writing from Southampton College and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many places, most recently in Necessary Fiction and Forklift, Ohio. In June of 2015, she was a full fellow at Vermont Studio Center.